We’ve spoken to a lot of teams who are separating their backend business logic from their front-end presentation layer – in other words, going headless. This type of digital transformation is gaining so much momentum because it gives retailers and brands the freedom and flexibility to innovate the customer experience faster.

Because this is a relatively new approach, the order of operations isn’t always clear. Generally, once an organization aligns on this approach, the technology team issues RFPs for the content, commerce, and custom services required. But that doesn’t cover all your bases. Projects can get quite far down the road before someone finally asks, where’s my website?

Here’s a recent example.

A retail chain made the strategic decision to go headless. They issued RFPs and selected a headless commerce platform and CMS that would work together to deliver the functionality they needed. It wasn’t until the delivery planning process that the retailer asked, “where’s my website?” In other words, where will it be hosted? Who will be managing it? What about scalability, security, and PCI compliance?

The web storefront can represent tens of millions, hundreds of millions, or even billions of dollars in revenue, but often it’s a secondary decision when going headless. This is no surprise as the website never had to be a separate consideration in the past, it was always tied to one of the backend platforms, whether it was the commerce or content system. And since those systems handled all the web storefront operations, it was never considered a difficult piece of the puzzle.

In a headless implementation, that changes. As the revenue driver, you need to consider the operational questions that will help determine the success and availability of your website:

Where will the site be hosted and who will own the uptime SLA for your shopper experience?

How will the web storefront scale to ensure performance isn’t negatively impacted during peak traffic?

How will you ensure the site is secure and PCI compliant?

How will the shopper experience be monitored to ensure errors are caught immediately?

Will it be possible to immediately roll-back the site if changes have negative impacts?

The web storefront is where your customers get access to the entire experience, including all the new content, features, and functionality you are able to quickly deliver in your new headless environment. A key piece to any “storefront” is ensuring it’s open and available when your customers want to buy.

If you’re going headless and find yourself wondering, “where’s my website?”, we’d love to talk to you. Mobify’s storefront for headless commerce has a built-in infrastructure to host, secure, scale, and monitor your website, ensuring you can count on one of your biggest revenue drivers to be up and running smoothly.